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Archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20230515142040/https://obscurito...

What I truly miss about the DOS era of gaming were that all individual games were their own engine.

Everything is about realism these days, where's the fantasy?

Fart around in the free section of itch.io and you’ll likely see you’ve just been playing too many games people are trying to sell you.

Try playing a few Indie games - they are not at all about realism.

There should be a game that is just tweaking autoexec.bat/config.sys to get enough conventional memory.

What do you mean? There's plenty fantasy. And plenty games with non-realistic art styles, like cel shading.

Not "fantasy," as in magic and dragons and such.

Fantasy, as in whimsy, as in unqualified wonder.

Too many games, shows, and movies these days feel compelled to explain why things are the way they are.

"Lore" has infested all of nerd media. You'd think it would make stories richer, but it has such a shaping effect on story that they all feel the same. Every character has a background, every history has a history, politics, different timelines, multiverse and alternate dimensions, hard magic, aliens, etc. etc.

Somehow every story from comics books to video games fall into the lore trap and comes out looking like a kitchen sink of tropes.

God yes. The demand for "consistency" is absolutely crippling. It prevents true fantasy and wonder from being built at all because critics dismantle the illusion looking for "gotchas".

I think this is mostly survivorship bias. We remember the interesting stuff and forget about the 90% of crap, while we experience current crap in real time. There are some really stellar games that inspired and shaped the industry, a few odd-balls that hold up surprisingly well but everyone seems to have forgotten about, and then there's a huge wasteland of <insert puzzle or arcade game>-clones.

If you go grab something like eXoDOS or eXoWin you will quickly find out how true your statement is. Think that collection has something like 7k titles in it. But only maybe 100-200 are worth actually playing for very long. Think archive.org has an online version of it. That can be randomly broken as some games require particular versions of dosbox to work correctly and archive org only uses one. The full exodos install has whatever is needed to make it work.

Also at this point we have a 'language' of how to play most of these types of games. During that period they were trying to figure out what that 'language' was. So playability can be very challenging at times. That can include visual cues, graphical expectations, sound, and controls.

I don't do that much gaming lately, but there's plenty of that sort of thing.

Mario, Zelda, there's a new Monkey Island, Sam and Max had a series of games, Lucky's Tale, etc.

Maybe they're not the most popular games, but there's no lack of those.

Well, Capitalism sounds like a fun game [0]:

> Tom Kosnik, the professor who taught with Capitalism at Harvard and Stanford who has since gone on to become a venture capitalist, praised the game for its high level of accuracy and difficulty, but he also noticed that some students had ethical hangups about making money from cigarettes and alcohol after realizing “how profitable they are.”3 After all, if it makes money, why wouldn’t you do it?

> The trick of Capitalism is that it makes you think like a capitalist. Within the mountains of jargon and earnings reports, it lures you into the insatiable mindset you’d need in order to thrive in business and grind your competitors into dust.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230206152649/https://obscurito...

I got excited by your username and thought I had found a bug in Hacker News.

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